Important Changes to Microsoft SDS and Teams

[rpwillis]

From https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/schooldatasync/changes-to-class-teams-provisioning.

 

As of 26th March 2020, new SDS profiles will no longer create Teams. It will still create the Office 365 Groups, but not the associated Teams. The Teachers/Educators will need to create their Teams manually, although they can add the students by searching for the appropriate group.

 

Group membership changes will also not by synchronised, they will need to be done manually. Although at this point in time there probably won't be much membership changes.

 

This is a big change, for new users and doesn't seem to be widely publicised. This change will affect all new SDS customers, and all new sync profiles created by existing SDS customers. If you have an active sync profile already configured, this change will not impact those sync profiles.

[woodham]

are the looking to replace that system with something else as its really useful

[victory2015]

This is awful! i do hope theres a new system coming because this will be huge issue for us if our sync profile needs replacing or something goes wrong?

[rpwillis]

From the article:

 

Teams and the SDS team are also working on an improved model, to enable Teachers to create the team and link it to the Office 365 Group created by SDS. This is currently in development and planned for release in coming weeks.

 

So they are planning something, but we don't know what yet. I guess that they are a victim of their own success, with the number of new schools coming on board in such a short space of time.

[3s-gtech]

Glad I set up the sync profile when I did then! Do you reckon Salamander will change their systems (in the paid suite) to try to keep the automation?

[victory2015]

From the article:

 

Teams and the SDS team are also working on an improved model, to enable Teachers to create the team and link it to the Office 365 Group created by SDS. This is currently in development and planned for release in coming weeks.

 

So they are planning something, but we don't know what yet. I guess that they are a victim of their own success, with the number of new schools coming on board in such a short space of time.

 

i hope so,.. but i know with my teachers they will not want to do this.. its an admin job so this is a lot of work if there isn't an automatic way.. hopefully as we use salamander there may be other options moving forward

[robyholmes]

I to hope Microsoft create an automated method of creating the teams. Asking teaching staff to do this is a barrier to them using it and will likely result it far less use.

 

I think the reason Microsoft are changing this is not all subjects or rather classes from your MIS would be useful to be Teams. So my hope is they allow staff to 'Activate' a team rather than create it from new. However lets see what they come up with.

 

There's always User Voice to feedback:

https://edu.uservoice.com/forums/602512-school-data-sync/

[Tefters]

Son of a goat herder!

 

Article specifically says new, does an existing profile that had an expiry that gets re-activiated count as new?

Edited March 30, 2020 by Tefters

[synaesthesia]

I suspect that might be tactical - let's face it, an average secondary blindly running SDS will hit 700-900 teams and the reality is only 2/3 of those will be needed. Could therefore be resource-saving measures?

[3s-gtech]

Partly why I paused the sync after the last pull. No one should be changing class lists at this time at ours, so no point it putting the load onto their servers when the data is going to be the same (plus a chance of it breaking and affecting existing Teams). Might be worth us all pausing it?

[free780]

You can create your own solution using powershell and the graph. The correct SQL View and powershell can create a Team.

[victory2015]

I actually wonder if this is permanent or just in reaction to the current take up.. as if you look under 365 this is the announcement it does say temporary.

Update March 26: Awareness of Microsoft 365 temporary feature adjustments for Education

MC207443, Stay Informed, Published date: 24 Mar 2020

Major Update: Announcement

Applies To: All

As we announced earlier this week, to best support our Microsoft 365 Education customers worldwide and accommodate new growth and demand during these unprecedented times, we are making a temporary adjustment to Office document behavior within Microsoft Teams for students and teachers. In addition, we want to announce a change to our School Data Sync service. We will keep this post updated if additional changes happen specific to our education customers.Note that the change previously announced is down below for reference.

School Data Sync: we are changing the class Sync behavior for all new Sync profiles created in SDS. SDS will still create the Office 365 group for each class, add the Educator as the group owner and Students as group members, and store the full class roster for each class synced. However SDS will no longer force provision the Team; instead Educators will need to create their Class Teams and add Students. Educators can add all their students by selecting the Classes Office 365 Group during the Class Team setup process. Roster changes will need to be maintained within Teams by the Educator from that point forward.This change will affect new SDS customers, and any new sync profiles created by existing SDS customers. Active sync profiles that are already configured will not be impacted.

For additional questions or assistance enabling SDS, contact the SDS onboarding team at https://aka.ms/sdssignup

Edited March 31, 2020 by victory2015

[leegcvcc]

I have had SDS Teams via Salamander provisioning running for 15 days now creating 347 Teams out of 556. I have asked if I have been put into the 1kbps throttling group!!! Microsoft have passed me all around various support channels and no one is helping. Their support is a joke at the moment where Teams and SDS is concerned

[fordea]

I have had SDS Teams via Salamander provisioning running for 15 days now creating 347 Teams out of 556. I have asked if I have been put into the 1kbps throttling group!!! Microsoft have passed me all around various support channels and no one is helping. Their support is a joke at the moment where Teams and SDS is concerned

I had the same issue with lots of section groups provisioned by SDS that weren't provisioning in to teams. We have around 500 of these groups and none of them were provisioning automatically like they had done in the past. We soon realised that they started provisioning about 5-10 minutes after the group owner logged in to Teams so figured that Microsoft had implemented some throttling based on that. Unfortunately this didn't work for all of them though and in the end I had to use powershell to create the remaining 200 or so teams that just wouldn't provision even after the owner had logged in to Teams multiple times.

[leegcvcc]

I had the same issue with lots of section groups provisioned by SDS that weren't provisioning in to teams. We have around 500 of these groups and none of them were provisioning automatically like they had done in the past. We soon realised that they started provisioning about 5-10 minutes after the group owner logged in to Teams so figured that Microsoft had implemented some throttling based on that. Unfortunately this didn't work for all of them though and in the end I had to use powershell to create the remaining 200 or so teams that just wouldn't provision even after the owner had logged in to Teams multiple times.

OK, cheers. They seem to have a spurt about 20 per day. Yesterday saw no further new Teams provisioned, today has seen 20 created. Unsure whether doing them via powershell at this stage would have any adverse affects. Plus I would have to sift the remaining unprovisioned teams? Don't fancy that much! Will the Teams provisioned using powershell still be dynamic in terms of group membership? Not looked at the Powershell creation method at all! Edited March 31, 2020 by leegcvcc

[rpwillis]

Quick update on the situation with SDS as we had a meeting with Microsoft yesterday. Obviously there has been unprecedented demand for Teams and their new policy is that Teams creation will be Teacher led. So that teachers who want to use Teams can, and those that don't want to use Teams don’t consume resources which could be used by those who want to use Teams.

 

They are aware that the current solution is not great and are in the process of releasing a better solution. This is going into beta today or tomorrow and all being well, they are hoping to release in the next couple of weeks. It will be a similar process in that teachers will need to create the Teams, however there will be an option to pick from their class groups as populated by SDS. This will be a pick list of just their classes, so they won't need to search the directory by class name. This will also synchronise the group membership with Teams so when we get back to normal and students are changing class, then their Teams memberships will change.

 

Longer term they are looking to improve the experience when teachers first log in - i.e. the blank screen problem. The aim being that they will be able to see which of their classes are not already Teams and have a one click experience to create them.

 

There are already existing programmatic ways of creating education Teams which means that the group members is synchronised with Teams membership. So if you are using a third party provisioning supplier they can add support for these, if they are not already using them. However, if using an automated tool, have a think about whether you need the entire roster created as Teams. If unnecessarily creating Teams, you will be consuming resources that could be used by others.

 

In summary, Microsoft are working hard to support teachers with Teams, but the demand has meant that they have had to throttle resources and target those who are/will be using it. Improvements are coming, some short term, others further away. SDS will be required to populate the underlying data so that teachers can create their teams easily. The biggest problem has been the way the change has been communicated, or not, which they acknowledge.

[Tefters]

Great update, thank you very much!

 

If it's any help to anyone my profile was re-activated yesterday instead of created from new and is busy auto creating all my classes with an activate button for the teachers to use when ready instead of this new teachers create method.

 

I do agree that not all classes/teachers will use it so why waste resources.

[AliG]

Is there any update on this? I would really like my Teams to be auto created after the SDS sync.

[AJWhite1970]

The new Teams API has been out for a couple of months now, both Ruler Connect and Salamander are both using it.

 

AFAIK, the only thing still missing from the API is the ability to link parental email addresses so you can use the Assignment Digest email

[browolf]

what if all the teachers jumped the gun and created teams but now they want an easy way to add their class pupils?

 

I thought I could make groups with powershell and they could add them to their team but it turns out that would only be a one off because if you change the group it doesn't update the team.

 

SDS wants to create its own teams.

 

Currently I've thought if the team names had the classcode in I could match teams to classes and add the students directly - updates would also be feasible.

 

any other ideas?

[Steve21]

That's an issue I was looking at recently, as we had the same issue occuring. (Additionally with last year teams that were unarchived).

 

Still not found a nice way to do it, unless you have dynamic groups available from higher o365 licensing. Currently trying to work out if there's a nice/easy way to do it via powershell with a daily SIMs export

 

Steve

[browolf]

My plan was for the teachers to put their sims classcodes in the team description and then I'd retrieve them with powershell so I had a means to match sims data to already created teams.

 

Wrote a script to do it.

 

Now I find out that teachers can't edit the description for class teams.

 

They'll have to put it in the title and I'll have to use reg exp to pull out a string like ##code##